A pair of lawsuits in New York accuse the state's teacher tenure guidelines of giving low-income and minority kids a subpar education.

Education advocacy group StudentsFirst and former CNN and NBC anchor Campbell Brown championed one of the lawsuits this week, NPR reported. The group says New York's laws guidelines only hurt the level of education students receive for three reasons.

• State law requires schools to decide after only three years to grant a teacher tenure, which often leads to permanent employment. The group says this timeframe isn't adequate time to assess a teacher's performance.

• State laws prohibit schools from dismissing ineffective teachers who are tenured.

• When schools are forced to decide which teachers keep their jobs in times of layoffs, seniority--not teaching skill and effectiveness--is primarily taken into account.

Brown, in an op-ed for the New York Daily News, said those challenging the state only have one goal in mind: ensuring that all of our public school children have good teachers.

"This legal case is built on the premise that our New York schools have many outstanding teachers who succeed under extraordinary pressures. They should not be treated like interchangeable parts, and they should not be asked to make up the academic shortfalls of those who are not doing their jobs. We should also move beyond another false line of attack. The lawsuit is not intended to erode any teacher's right to due process. And it will not."

The New York lawsuits follow a California judge's ruling last month in a similar case, Vergara v. California. The Los Angeles Superior Court judge said the state's tenure laws violated the right of equality of education by giving low-income and minority students "grossly ineffective" teachers, NPR reported.

But Michael Rebell, a professor of law and educational practice at Columbia University, thinks the New York lawsuits won't produce the same result as the one in California for various reasons. Among them, the California law requires schools to decide whether or not to permanently hire an employee after only 18 months, not New York's three years.

Karen E. Magee, president of the New York State United Teachers, opposes the lawsuits because she thinks tenure protections are necessary, she wrote for the Times-Union of Albany.

"Picture what would happen if teachers -- perhaps your child's teacher -- could be fired at will or face career jeopardy for politically motivated reasons. Instead, teachers are able to join parents in denouncing excessive standardized testing. They stand up at board meetings and oppose budget cuts that hurt students. And, in communities where rising property taxes are triggering loud opposition, they don't have to worry that their school board will simply lay off the most expensive teachers -- even if they happen to be the best and most experienced -- to save money."

On the contrary, Michelle Rhee, StudentsFirst founder, told NPR that her group's lawsuit aims to streamline the process for dismissing "egregiously incompetent teachers."

"There are states and jurisdictions in which the dismissal process is way too time-consuming and cumbersome, making it impossible for teachers to be fired...And so, when we have nonsensical laws that give people a job for life regardless of performance, we should remove those policies or fix them."

So instead of firing the underperforming, tenured teachers, schools will let go of newer teachers who kids like, said Rochester parent Mona Pradia, who's among the plaintiffs in one of the New York lawsuits. She told the Democrat & Chronicle that her daughter's fourth-grade teachers were excellent and helped her progress through her disability. But budget cuts replaced those teachers with what Pradia called "less effective teachers." Her daughter's performance plummeted with the tenured teachers.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuits created a misleading argument, said Francis Lewis High School ESL teacher Arthur Goldstein on The Huffington Post.

"Campbell Brown's Law says whatever goes wrong in school is the fault of the tenured teachers. If you fail, it's because the teacher had tenure and therefore failed you. Absolutely everyone is a great parent, so that has nothing to do with how children behave. Campbell Brown's Law says parents have no influence whatsoever on their children. If parents have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, that will have no effect. If they provide no supervision because they aren't around, that won't affect kids either."

While opinions are strong, the legal process might take a while. NPR reported that the New York lawsuit is likely to take years, and the California decision is being appealed by teacher unions.

Something needs to change though, said James Richardson, vice president of Hynes Communications, in an op-ed for USA Today.

"Underperforming educators can be found in any institution, public or private, charter or traditional, but only the best among them treat education as a commodity and parents as consumers. The marketplace demands change, and traditional public schools instead remain fixed in decades past -- hoping to dupe earnest-but-forgiving parents into believing that their self-interest is on par with concern for students, because it isn't."

Do you agree with the lawsuits against the state? Or do New York's education problems go beyond tenured teachers? Share your thoughts in the comments.